A whole series of grades of consciousness leads up from the root- beginnings of obscure childish intuition, in which there is still no clear world for a soul or self-conscious soul within a world, to the highly intellectualized states of which only the men of fully-ripened civilizations are capable. This gradation is at the same time an expansion of symbolism from the stage in which there is an inclusive meaning of _all_ things to one in which separate and specific signs are distinguished. It is not merely when, after the manner of the child, the dreamer and the artist, I am passive to a world full of dark significances; or when I am awake without being in a condition of extreme alertness of thought and act (such a condition is much rarer even in the consciousness of the real thinker and man of action than is generally supposed)—it is continuously and always, for as long as my life can be considered to be a waking life at all, that I am endowing that which is outside me with the _whole_ content that is in me, from the half-dreamy impressions of world-coherence to the rigid world of causal laws and number that overlies and binds them. And even in the domain of pure number the symbolical is not lacking, for we find that refined _thought_ puts inexpressible meanings into signs like the triangle, the circle and the numbers 7 and 12. This is the _idea of the Macrocosm, actuality as the sum total of all symbols in relation to one soul_. From this property of being significant nothing is exempt. All that is, symbolizes. From the corporeal phenomena like visage, shape, mien (of individuals and classes and peoples alike), which have always been known to possess meaning, to the supposedly eternal and universally-valid forms of knowledge, mathematics and physics, everything speaks out of the essence of one and only one soul.